Glass Doors

Last month in Birmingham, England I attended a reading by the extraordinary novelist Will Self.  A bit early, I decided to drop into a café for a quick coffee.  Although I know Birmingham city centre quite well, I don’t know a single independent café.  Like independent bookstores, they’ve all gone to the wall. So, it had to be a Starbucks lookalike, Café Nero I think – couches, forgettable music, customers locked behind laptops.  I stood in line, ordered my espresso macchiato, then shuffled obediently sideways, waited in line again until my drink arrived then walked like I knew what I was doing to the island with the sugar and water, and having filled myself a glass I made my way towards an empty couch. Sometimes I feel like a robot, though without really knowing how robots feel.

From my seat I had a view of the door. I couldn’t resist it, and on impulse I got up and took a photograph of the door.  That’s one way of drawing attention to oneself, I must say. From behind the counter a kid darted forward, clad in uniform that included the regulation baseball cap, and asked me could he be of assistance.  Apparently taking photos of glass doors is considered aberrant behavior in controlled, risk-free environments, like Britain. And by the way, when did British waiters, or baristas, start wearing baseball caps? Does it have anything to do with Blair’s attempt to become the prime minister of the USA?

Anyway, what attracted my attention was the signs on the door.  I guess it’s an obsession of mine, though I do think it is a symptom of the nanny state that Britain has become.  It’s also an indication of the growing ugliness of public spaces.  If there is a wall, slap a warning sign on it; a glass door,  cover it with stickers that say “Glass Door”.  I once got in a train to Birmingham airport and counted seventeen safety signs in the carriage, including one that said “Please take the time to familiarize yourself with our safety signs”. After deboarding my plane in Zurich I got in a Swiss train.  The carriage had one small sign, a sticker, indicating “no smoking”. How do the Swiss manage? I would venture, they are grown up.

Well, back to the glass door.  Luckily my photo wasn’t confiscated by the pimply waiter.  As you can see, there is a sign over the door that tells you this is the exit - always helpful. Then, each glass door has a sticker prominently warning you that this is, well, glass, just in case you’re stupid.  And then, alongside each door there are big exclamation marks, warnings that these are sliding doors, just to save you from being crushed between the door and the wall, though really, if you happen to have squeezed yourself between the glass door and the wall then, as far as I’m concerned, you deserve to be crushed. Off to one side of the doors you have some gadget ot other with four signs telling you when and how  to use it and the penalty that you'll pay if you abuse it.  Maybe its my deep Irish peasantry, but such nonsense stirs the vandal in me. I remember a time when entering and exited through doors was a simple affair.

Some people will argue all these signs are simply to cover the business from being sued. Think of all the people who would otherwise be jamming themselves in between the door and the wall in an attempt to become millionaires.  But, my musing done, it was time to go.  I had warned Will Self that I was coming, but he wasn’t going to wait for me.  As I walked towards the dangerous exit, would you belief it, the doors jammed.  An electronic malfunction; a door engineer had to be called.  He arrived within a minute, in regulation uniform, including baseball cap. At last, the obnoxious doors sighed open. I was almost late for the reading. I should have sued.

Love-locked in Paris

While recently walking back to the Left Bank by way of the Pont de l'Archevêché in Paris I was surprised to find the railing of the bridge festooned with thousands of padlocks. Paris is supposed to be the city of love, but this is a relatively new addition to that reputation.  Just under the tower of Notre-Dame, on the little bridge that links the Ile de la Cite with the Left Bank, lovers inscribe their names on a lock, fasten it to the railing of the bridge, and then toss the keys into the dark Seine.

It's a way of declaring love, a romantic gesture and, perhaps, an attempt at gaining immortality. Whatever happens in the future, our love-lock will always remain, and our names will always be entwined on a bridge in Paris.

I can't help but smile at the simplicity of the gesture.  Apparently the authorities have tried to quash this habit, but have had give in to public pressure - people's power.  Yet the symbolism of using a lock to express your love is ambiguous. In fairy stories, a door that is padlocked implies something that is hidden, even forbidden.  And of course, humans being humans, we are irresitibly drawn to the forbidden, often with fatal consequences. Bluebeard kept a chamber of his castle under lock and key and warned his wife never to venture into the forbidden space.  Of course one day she did, to find the bloodless corpses of his former wives.  Terrified, she realised her mistake, but too late; she had fallen into her husband's morbid trap and and quickly, horrifyingly, met the same fate as her predecessors.  According to Jungians, Bluebeard represents the animus or male personification within woman - in the words of Jungian pyschoanalyst M-L. von Franz, Bluebeard "personifies all those semiconscious, cold, destructive reflections that invade a woman in the small hours, especially when she has failed to realize some obligation of feeling."  Hmmmm. Let me just say, I'm not a Jungian.

On the other hand, we keep things under lock and key in order to deny change, which denies growth.  A love that is kept under lock and key is a love which is bound to putrify and die. Didn't the medieval crusader lock his wife's forbidden zone in a chastity belt, in an attempt to deny entry to others into his property. To be locked in, has all sorts of stifling connotations. Neil Young once sang "You lose the word love when you say the word mine".  Well these days plenty of young lovers in Paris are shouting to the world "He or She is mine forever".

Keys without the locks have all sorts of meanings in western art.  An old man with a key, or a set of keys, is probably St. Peter with the keys to heaven, or he might be a prophet or simply a member of the church who carries the key to salvation; a bird with a key in its beak usually symbolises salvation. 

A key put into a lock has a clear erotic connotation, and thousands of examples can be found in art and popular imagery.  Of course in erotic imagery the key being inserted into the lock is about to carrying out the action of unlocking rather than locking, yet the newset romantic gesture in Paris involves locking rather than unlocking. And a logical extrapolation would mean that if the lock represents the female genitalia and the key the male, then the many keys tossed daily into the River Seine would represent some form of joyous castration, an uncomfortable thought.

A famous example of the lock and key as a sacred symbol is found in the Merode altarpiece from the early 15th century Flemish artist Robert Campin where the door represents the entrance to heaven, the lock represents charity and the key the desire for God.

Robert Campin: detail

The locks that now grace the bridges of Paris in the vicinity of Notre-Dame are certainly not altarpieces, but they do have something ritualistic about them.  On the one hand we have the great cathedral providing the ancient symbol of a religious faith of a bygone age; on the other the spontaneous gesture of the locks demonstrating a symbol of contemporary profane love. I wonder which will last longer.

Robert Campin: Merode Altarpiece

Ruins in Paris

Earlier this month I spent a long weekend in Paris.  Paris in the autumn, but 28 degrees centigrade everyday.  It was heavenly.

One morning we paid a visit to the Louvre to view one of my favourite rooms, the big hall with 19th century French paintings, where one of our students gave a presentation on David's Coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte.  It is a huge painting, but the audience that crowded around the painting as the student gave her presentation was fairly big too, as you can see in the photo below.  Sometimes it is difficult to see the art among the crowds.

Because I had written something on my blog recently about Delacroix's horses, I took the opportunity to take this photo - a detail from his The Death of Sardanapalus.

I am a creature of habit, and I always take a light lunch at one of the restaurants in the beautiful and peaceful Tuileries Garden.  This is where the French Royal Family were finally deposed in August 1792.  After the mob had taken the palace the unfortunate Swiss Guards had to be scraped from the curtains and ceilings.

Nothing of that terrible violence remains today, but I did spot a new work of art that provides a warning for the future.  As we strolled through the garden I spotted (well, how can one really miss it,) a reclining, giant white column, reminding us, after all we had just come from Switzerland, of an oversized Alphorn.  One of the things about contemporary art in public spaces is, your never quite sure what it is.  You're presented with a dilemma: what is this?  Is it a piece of rubbish? Something that has just fallen out of space? An unfinished piece of roadworks? A gigantic joke?  Or is it a work of art?  I decided to risk making a fool of myself and prompty pronounced "O look, a work of art".

Like most works of public art, it simply begged to be climbed upon.  But the good, respectable Parisians relaxed on the green caste-iron chairs or walked primly past, ignoring the unignorable.  After all, how can you not notice a giant column 100 meters long that is lying on the floor, tipping into the pond, like an oversized cigarette, or even better, a gigantic joint resting on an ash tray.

As I said, works like this are simply asking to be climbed upon.  But not being the brave sort, I suggested to a student who had accompanied me that she should.  And so she did.

Admittedly, she didn't get very far.

So, you are no doubt bursting to know what this long white piece of plaster is. It is called Poems for Earthlings and it is the creation of the Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas.  It is, I suppose, a reminder that our civilization will also some day come to an end, that all that will remain of our proud towers and gadgetary will be ruins that aliens will clamber upon.  It is apt that this piece has come to lie where the ancien regime came to its bitter end in 1792.

Perhaps Poems for Earthlings is meant to depress us and it certainly reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Shelley's Ozymandias:

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

However, despite rising temperatures and news of floods in New Zealand and the Philipines, Italy and Thailand, despite news of rising seas and glacier meltdown in Greenland and the Alps, despite the catastrophe of tsunami and nuclear contamination in Japan, it was hard to feel depressed in the warmth and sunshine of Paris in October, even if that unseasonal heat is a harbinger of things to come.

Wagner Article in History Today Magazine

My article on Richard Wagner and the historical background to his composing of Tristan und Isolde has just appeared in the November issue of History Today, now available in shops like Borders and W.H. Smiths.  You can read the introduction of "Richard and Mathilde" online.

The magazine has also published this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Tristran und Isolde to coincide with my article.

Urban Knitting in Zurich

Using the slogan "Wool in the City" a bunch of creative people treated the city of Zurich to a new type of friendly graffiti this weekend – Urban Knitting.  Ignoring warnings from the police, teams of knitters hung their works from lampposts, sculptures, park benches, even fire hydrants, in what must be one of the most inoffensive mass illegal actions ever.  The phenomenon started in Austin, Texas in 2005 and has since spread to the likes of New York and Berlin.  Unlike traditional graffiti it causes no damage at all.

Modes of Transport and Classical Music

Listening to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony this morning, I had an image of a man, Schubert I suppose, riding a galloping horse.  And I wondered could early 19th century romanticism be linked to the main form of transportation at the time - horse riding? Romantic painters like Delacroix and Gericault certainly loved to give us graphic images of horses straining at the bit, eyes enlarged in fear, nostrals flaring.  Could these wild horses be present in romantic works like Schubert's symphonies as well?

Delacroix: Lion attacking an Arab on a Horse

And now that I think about it, is it a coincidence that the jittering movements  and improvisations of jazz coincide with the onset of our modern obsession, the darting automobile, again reflected in the visual arts in the late works of Mondrian, such as "Broadway Boogie-Woogie".

And what of today? Do not Steve Reich's tedious works of repetition reflect the barley perceptible coughing motion of the modern high-speed train? I can imagine enjoying them on my iPod while riding the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, but surely not seated on a saddle.  Do not the pared down and depersonalised sounds of the works of Philip Glass reflect the atmosphere of airports and commercial flights? And if I need a parallel from the visual arts, let me pick the abstract  works of Robert Nymann, as white and featureless as the atmosphere through which we fly, broken only by the turbelence of his rippled surface.

Robert Nymann

Marx said something like - show me your technology and I'll show you your government.  Doolan now says, show me your means of transport and I'll show you your music. Just a thought.

ZIS Lipdub

This year we decided to do something a little bit different - shoot a short film with the teachers, staff and nearly 500 teenage students in our school. And here is the result. Hope you enjoy it: